Tuesday, June 07, 2005

Why we should blow up animals.

Now, many of you will have seen Monty Python’s “And now for something completely different” with the cut-scenes that consist solely of animals exploding.Many of you may not have realized that these cut-scenes have formed the basis of Japanese Oceanic Ecological Research.

The Japanese – okay, not that I think you can actually catergorise an entire nation by the actions of a few, but it just saves time – are proposing to start hunting Fin and Humpback whales because their increased numbers have been detrimental to Minke whales.

“"At this moment, abundance of Antarctic minke whales is stable in Area IV," Dr Matsuoka's paper said. "However, increases in abundance and habitat expansion of humpback and fin whales may be causing competition with Antarctic minke whales."”

So in order to protect the health of the Minke whales that the Japanese would like to blow up, the Japanese are going to blow up other whales. Now I like blowing up animals as much as the next man, well maybe the man next to him,… no, not Kevin, the other guy…yeah, the one with the dead cat strapped to his head, but even I know I like blowing them up because it’s fun. I certainly don’t regularly blow up the neighbourhood dogs to ensure the increased health of the neighbourhood cats (that I secretly want to blow at a later date). I do it cos it’s fun.

SO WHY DON’T THE JAPANESE JUST ADMIT THAT BLOWING UP WHALES IS FUN instead of this fucking bullshit about increasing the thickness of blubber in Minke whales? Do they think that they'll get Experience Points faster and go up a level? And I don’t for a second believe that the Japanese actually like eating whale - it’s just that the price of seafood is so expensive of over there, so some cut-price whale chunks are a welcome addition to any bowl.

Apparently the Minke whales’ blubber is getting thinner (and how do they know it’s getting thinner? Because they’ve been blowing them up for fourteen years and have the graphs to prove it. You remember the outcry when Aussie gymnasts were given pinch tests? Well imagine the outcry if the way they testes gymnasts’ fludoobedas was to BLOW THEM UP?), which indicates stress and less food, because there are more other whalesout there and there isn’t enough krill to go round. But guess who else eats krill? The Japanese!

Now I’m a bright guy. Maybe not as bright as a thousand suns, but I know some things about whales.1) Whales are identified by the rest of the world by their distinctive flukes. This is a far less fun way of counting whale populations than blowing them up, but it is more polite.2) Whales are cool. This is the only reason to preserve whales. Any talk about ecological niches is bullshit. Without whales we’ll just have more fish – the ecological niche is filled again. Gerald Durrell defended conservation best when he concluded an introduction to one of his books with “Because the world will be a darker place without them.”3) Whales are not “the cockroaches of the sea” as one Japanese exponent of whaling claimed. Whales do not scatter when the light goes on. If you rip whales’ heads off they don’t keep living. Whales do not freak you out when you’re taking a crap at ten o’clock at night.

At least the Norwegians pretend that they are preserving their culture and the Inuit use hand thrown harpoons to take the bastards out. They don’t claim they’re doing it for ecological reasons. They claim they are doing it because they’ve always done it. And too right! It’s like Aussies taking the piss out of the Japs. We do it, because we’ve always done it. We didn’t go to war with them because we were worried about them encroaching on the ecological niches of the Chinese and Papua New Guineas. We did it because war is fun. And war has got infinitely more fun since you can actually blow people up. Imagine how boring it had to have been to actually stab someone with your own spear! It’s only since the Japanese have started making Anime and selling still-warm school girls panties that anyone in the West has taken them seriously. And frankly if they can justify their big-eyes-little-mouth and panty-shots with the all-encompassing Truth of “Cos it’s fun” (which it is), then the fact they can’t come up with even a half-arsed justification for destructive scientific sampling just says they can go get rooted. This reasoning isn’t even quarter-arsed. It’s not even a brief flash of buttock – and if anyone can teach us about the briefest flash of buttock it’s the Japanese. This reasoning is just embarrassing. Maybe they know that the only people they have to convince are the Americans and if anyone understands the idea of solving a problem by blowing something up, it’s the Yanks.

Look, the Japanese didn’t take too kindly to the destructive scientific tests delivered upon them in the past. So, it’s hard to see how they can think it’s such a good idea now.